Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
While thus interesting themselves in educational administration and the
content of school curricula, women have not neglected the physical
aspects of school buildings. The movement for sanitary school buildings
in which women have sometimes led, instigated officials to lead, helped
personally, or inspired janitors to act, has been followed up by the
decoration of the buildings. The beneficial effect of artistic interiors
on children, who spend so large a proportion of their waking hours in
school buildings, is incalculable. Their physical comfort and their
moral and artistic natures are advanced in a measure difficult to
estimate.
Organized first for self-culture of a literary and artistic character,
the expansive nature of club women has expressed itself in the extension
of that acquired culture to the children in the schools. Volumes could
be written if an attempt were made to record the stories of the efforts
made by women to beautify schools and equip them with books for
supplementary reading. That story is one of the best known of all and,
for that reason, needs less attention at this place, not because it has
been of little importance but because almost every hamlet and town has
felt the influence of women in that direction. According to their
incomes and their taste, they have sought to introduce as much beauty
and harmony and as much literary and scientific appreciation as
possible.
Believing that the school yard should receive at least as much care as
the town cemetery, women have planted trees, seeds, and bulbs. For the
interior of the school building, they have at times furnished an
inexpensive photographic reproduction for a school wall and a piece of
statuary, or expensive rugs and pictures, or a piano, and many times
they have dominated the whole scheme of inside decoration and even the
architecture itself.
Apparently women can build as well as suggest how schoolhouses should be
built. Miss Alice M. Durkin of New York, who was recently given the
contract to build Public School No. 39 in the Bronx, wonders why more
women do not go into this work. She built a public school in Jersey City
and another in Brooklyn. She employs between 600 and 700 men. In a
competitive contest for the $250,000 extension to the Metropolitan
Museum in Central Park, New York, Miss Durkin came out second and she
was third in the competition for the New York Public Library.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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